I have got some big news about my mental health. (Yes: he’s going on about that AGAIN!!!). I am close to giving up on a lifetime’s effort to get effective, long-lasting treatment. Tomorrow, the results of my latest mental health assessment will be unveiled to a waiting world – well, me – and I suspect there will be nothing beyond Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) on offer. I’ve done CBT on two occasions and it didn’t work. If I am offered this again, I am going to turn it down. I am not going to waste the taxpayers’ money and I am not going to waste my time.
Instead, I am going to manage, or I should say mismanage, my own depression and anxiety for the rest of of my life. I am obviously not trained in aspect of treating depression but I usually some techniques for dealing with it. The main one is to cut myself off from the rest of the world. With a few exceptions, that’s what I have done consistently since Covid struck two years ago. I simply avoid situations where I am likely to feel ill. It’s not as difficult as it sounds.
One place I always enjoyed social interaction, and a lot of it, was at Bristol Rovers, the club I’d supported actively until 2018. For reasons I really can’t be bothered to go into again, I’ve been gradually falling out of love with the club since 2006. In 2018, just after I’d suffered a major mental meltdown at the hands of my former employer, the bullies and abusers of the British Red Cross, I decided to step away. Of course, I missed certain aspects, such as the social side which I’d always found comforting. Every two weeks, I’d meet friends and acquaintances and I had a good time. When I walked away – God, that sounds awful dramatic: trust me, it wasn’t – I guess I didn’t think through how it would effect my social life. But it did.
It was, of course, my decision to stop going to games so I was guilty of cutting myself off from other people, not them cutting me off. Yet, being a woke snowflake, I was a little hurt when the texts, messages and calls stopped coming. And, if I am being totally honest, I was feeling a little self-pitying. Years on and I am not only divorced from the club I have always supported, I’m divorced from friends and acquaintances.
As my sense of self-loathing intensified, I felt I was a bit of a fraud. I had ideas and opinions on many things, but who the hell was I to put them forward? It wasn’t jealousy I felt when thinking of my friends and acquaintances, most if not all of whom were more successful than I was. One O level at school and a lifetime of low end professional mediocrity and now the truth began to dawn on me. I didn’t belong. I wasn’t as good as they were. No wonder hardly anyone was getting in touch with me. And anyway, I wasn’t getting in touch with them. They had successful lives to get on with. Why bother with someone unsuccessful? Who can blame them for not bothering? I couldn’t.
In my village, the same thing happened. As I retreated from the world, I lost touch with the local community, particularly the local sporting community, and again, I don’t blame anyone for not making contact. Again, I was the one who walked away. Most of them are highly successful in their own right, with good, well-paid jobs, the sort of jobs I could never aspire to, let alone get.
With all of my older ‘blood’ family either dead or living abroad, my world became even smaller. It’s not easy explaining 52 years of poor mental health via email or messenger and I absolutely hate things like Facetime because too often I have to look at a small picture of myself in the corner. My hatred of myself includes what I see in the mirror, as well as everything I have become. And tomorrow, I expect to be giving up in the search for better mental health.
I’m already resigned to never finding out whether I’ve suffered a non-diagnosis of something like ADHD or autism, which might have some explanation on the endless car crash of life that’s followed because the waiting list under Boris Fucking Johnson’s government – and he has only been in Number 10 for two and a bit years – has gone up from 18 weeks to 3.5 to 4 years, so if CBT is all this private company that takes NHS referrals can come up with, then that will be that. I’ll keep taking the drugs because my GP, who today wrote to me to say there’s nothing she can do to hurry along my ADHD/PTSD/autism/bipolar assessment, has explained the potential drawbacks of doing that and, according to the GP, even if I can’t feel a benefit that doesn’t mean there isn’t any. In other words, the drugs do work, if only to take the edge of things.
None of this helps with the chip on my working class shoulder. Although success in life does not always depend on financial rewards, the latter can help. Here my failings carry their own cost. For instance, the woman or man paying a higher rate of taxation will not be dependent on the paucity of mental health services offered by the government. She or he can go private. I have no such option beyond the short term and short term therapy is barely better than no therapy at all. And that will form the basis of what I am likely to decide to do tomorrow. Nothing.
I’m giving up, it’s all over, there’s nothing left to do. Luckily, my close family and friends, who number far less than I first thought, still love me and given who and what I am, that’s probably still far more than I deserve.
Yes, I’m depressed. You get on with your life, I’ll get on with mine. I’m done with talking about it but don’t expect me, still wallowing deep in my pool of self-pity, to not write about it. It’s not Pulitzer prize writing, is it, but it’s the best that I can do. And for those people I haven’t been in contact with, well, it’s a two-way street and I can see where I’m not wanted.
